Yo-Yo Sein

Die Wahrheit ist häßlich: wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zu Grunde gehn . ¹

So if there is to be truthfulness about the horrors [extreme, undeserved, uncompensated, unredeemed, hideous suffering; cosmic awfulness], and no belief about their being worthwhile under some Leibnizian or Hegelian calculation, there will be only a fully conscious refusal to be crushed, and we shall need a conception, necessarily very schematic, of a life that might adequately express that refusal. ²

Here's a scene from Pynchon's second novel (between V. and Gravity's Rainbow), the first installment of the California trilogy (completed by Vineland and Inherent Vice), and to get the ball rolling I'll kick off that it manifests the Grundthema of all his work:

“[Oedipa Maas] drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala.  She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit.  The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.  Though she knew even less about radios than she did about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.  There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.  Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant.  As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.  She suspected that much.” ³  

A revelation trembling just past the threshold of understanding solicits a crossing of that threshold in order to receive the message, ‘to find out.' Cross how?   In Aristotle's formulation, ‘by nature all human beings reach out to know.' ⁴  After a time this continual tentatio  can get frustrating, like chasing an unfunny shaggy-dog, and the seeker herself begins to tremble from the strain of stretching out to get it, to know—“the stretch of a soul” in Clare Carlisle's phrase. ⁵  

Carlisle observes that Goethe and the German Romantics adapted “Spinoza's view that some things manifest divine nature more intensively than others.”  Evidently manifestation  of divine nature ‘admits of a more and a less.' ⁶   So the question ‘Who am I?' “is theological as well as biographical. It asks how some particular being shares in, and manifests, the divine nature.” ⁷    Seeing a life, she says, “as at once natural and theological—at once human and divine—means receiving it as an incarnation.” ⁸

In other words receiving it as a ‘cosmogram,' which Carlisle explains is “a particular thing, such as an object or a myth or a dance, that offers an image of the cosmos as a whole.  At the same time, it embodies and articulates its specific milieu: the materials it was made from, the crafts and technologies used to produce it, the ways it is (or was) engaged with or put to use.” ⁹   So that “if we ask how a particular human life expresses a milieu with cosmological dimensions, we are preparing to read it cosmogrammatically.  Life writing [biography] turns out to be a cosmological art.” ¹⁰

And this cosmological art as practiced by Carlisle is deeply attached, like the novels of her subject George Eliot, to giving good news. ¹¹   “While Saint Theresa's life,” Carlisle says, “was a paradigm of remarkable goodness, Dorothea [of Middlemarch¹² ] exemplifies an inconspicuous ‘unhistoric' goodness that both augments and reveals the goodness of the world.” ¹³   Again, Eliot's Daniel Dironda  “enacts a literary argument; each singular life unfolds within, and is shaped by, a cosmological milieu—and each life radiates, in its own unique unfolding, a divine source of truth, beauty and goodness.” ¹⁴   If, in Daniel Dironda ,

“Gwendolen's apparently insignificant life expresses not just a vast cultural and psychological world—an intensely rich human milieu—but also a deep, possibly divine or cosmic goodness that impels souls to search for it, then every life might be ‘read' in this way. Every life might be, as Spinoza put it, a manifestation of God.  Gwendolen's ordinariness and her averagely flawed character are theologically crucial.   Even here , Eliot seems to be telling us, there is transcendence—a stretch of the soul, a glimpse of something shining, perhaps not far away at all.” ¹⁵

Well, it is  the Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology, so what did you expect? As far as I'm aware no Gifford Lecturer has ever affirmed ‘Natural Theology is ontological pareidolia schlechthin ,' although Michael Gazzaniga came close.  Instead the modal message goes like this:   “To read [William James's Gifford Lectures] The Varieties of Religious Experience  is to believe not only that God might exist but that men might be good — and more, that they may be taken at their word.” ¹⁶

Whereas a Pynchonogram would run something like ‘each life radiates as the fourth power of its absolute temperature.'  More generally, ‘every life is a manifestation of ∆ S ≥ 0, and you can forget about =.'  Looking downhill Oedipa gazes upon Chthonie's mantle ¹⁷  and sees the ‘ordered swirl' of a housing development, which strikes her as once did the ‘printed circuit/circuit card' of a transistor radio. And where the mighty strength of Ocean's river flows along the rim of The Shield, ¹⁸  here at San Narciso anthropogenic smog hung all round the horizon.  Oed senses ‘words were being spoken' from the eye of a slowly rotating whirlwind:—another ordered swirl, another circuit; a cyclonic convection cell is a familiar entropy-accelerating system.  These outward patterns are various levels of a single mise en abyme:

Big whorls have little whorls,

And Oedipa can sight ‘em;

And little whorls have lesser whorls,

And so ad infinitum.      

Michael Chabon suggests that Pynchon composes in systems. ¹⁹   Right, dissipative  systems.  In the story ‘Entropy' (1960) we read that “Henry Adams, three generations before his own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that Power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stand as much for love as for power, that the two are indeed identical; and that love therefore, not only makes the world go round but also makes the boccie ball spin, the nebula precess.” ²⁰   Thermodynamics as whirlygigology.

“Aubade's neck made a golden bow as she bent over the sheets of foolscap, scribbling away in the green murk of the room.  ‘As a young man at Princeton,' Callisto was dictating, nestling the bird against the gray hairs of his chest, ‘Callisto had learned a mnemonic device for remembering the Laws of Thermodynamics: you can't win, things are going to get worse before they get better, who says they're going to get better.  At the age of fifty-four, confronted with Gibbs' notion of the universe, he suddenly realized that undergraduate cant had been oracle, after all.  That spindly maze of equations became, for him, a vision of ultimate, cosmic heat-death.  He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100 percent efficiency: and about the theorem of Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases.  It was not, however, until Gibbs and Boltzmann brought to this principle the methods of statistical mechanics that the horrible significance of it all dawned on him: only then did he realize that the isolated system—galaxy, engine, human being, culture, whatever—must evolve spontaneously toward the Condition of the More Probable.'” ²¹

The formalism of thermodynamics as cosmogram. While Callisto drones his memoirs to Aubade in their hothouse apartment, downstairs in number 37 Meatball Mulligan is trying to keep his lease-breaking party, ²²  now very late in its second day, “from deteriorating into total chaos.”  Meatball has just been listening to his friend Saul, who's come in through the kitchen window, opine about communication/information theory and the breakdown of Saul's marriage.

“Tell a girl, [says Saul] ‘I love you.' No trouble with two-thirds of that, it's a closed circuit. Just you and she.  But that nasty four-letter word in the middle, that's the one you have to look out for.  Ambiguity.  Redundance. Irrelevance, even.  Leakage.  All this is noise.  Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit.” ²³     

With ‘Entropy' ‘Pynchon became Pynchon.'  Thereafter it's all about people trying to make sense of—to isolate the signal (if any) from the noise of—interlocking dissipative systems composed of other people and meantime not get crushed.  We see human lives as at once entropic and phenomenological; sense-making as the mechanism specific to human being of accelerating entropy production.  

The Tristero, so far as Oedipa can find out, is a circuit for paper-message transmission, alt-net to the U.S. Mail.  Provided, of course, that The Tristero indeed exists, which Oed feels compelled to find out, too. And “She also wanted to know why the chance of its being real should menace her so.” ²⁴   The finding out is driving her mad. ²⁵   “Look, you have to help me.  Because I really think I am going out of my head.” ²⁶  (There's a nice knock-down transcendence for you.)  

“She told him quickly, using up no more than a minute, what she'd learned about The Tristero, what had happened to Hilarius, Mucho, Metzger, Driblette, Fallopian. ²⁷  ‘So you are,' she said, ‘the only one I have.  I don't know your name, don't want to.  But I have to know whether they arranged it with you.  To run into me by accident, and tell me your story about the post horn [Tristero's symbol ²⁸ ].  Because it may be a practical joke for you, but stopped being one for me a few hours ago.  I got drunk and went driving on these freeways.  Next time I may be more deliberate.  For the love of God, human life, whatever you respect, please.  Help me.'” ²⁹           

The heroism, if that's the term, of Pynchon's leading folk is their fully conscious refusal—“with the courage you find you have when there is nothing more to lose” ³⁰ —to be crushed.  That refusal takes the specific form of an against-all-odds perseverance in the effort to know, even as they are swept into and beat upon by various cyclonic forces which may or may not (paranoia, pareidolia) incarnate intentionality: “Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth;” “Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.  Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero; ” “ the unnameable act, the recognition, the Word;” “the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.” ³¹   (But this is California, U.S.A., where ‘everybody knows the bird is the word.'  There seems no limit to what the radio can tell us. ³² )

Heidegger mentions as one candidate figure for human existence a storm, ein Sturm, that sweeps over our planet, der über unseren Planeten fegt. ³³   Human being ‘uses itself up,' he says, ³⁴  and his image for that phenomenon is Wirbel, whirlwind, cyclone, vortex; ³⁵   also Taumel, reeling, tumbling. ³⁶   For Oedipa, “It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process.  It astonished her to think that so much could be lost . . .” ³⁷  

Heidegger captions a fragment on Herder and language Der ewige Kreisel , evoking I guess ewige Wiederkehr.³⁸  But Kreisel puts us in mind of Yoyodyne, Inc., whose Galactronics Division is “San Narciso's big source of employment,” ³⁹  and “a company with factories scattered careless about the country and more government contracts than it really knew what to do with.” ⁴⁰   ( der Taumel seiner Gemächte)  Yoyodyne originated as the Chiclitz Toy Company, with “one tiny independent-making shop on the outskirts of Nutley, New Jersey” in the late 1940s.  Then, “For some reason the children of America conceived around this time a simultaneous and psychopathic craving for simple gyroscopes, the kind which are set in motion by a string wound around the rotating shaft, something like a top.” German for a child's top is Kreisel.  Anyhow, CTC “was well on the way to cornering the toy-gyroscope market” when a group of school kids touring the shop explained to the founder, Clayton ‘Bloody' Chiclitz, the concept of the gyrocompass, and “Chiclitz remembered vaguely from a trade magazine that the government was always in the market for these.”  Chiclitz started making gyros for the government, and “Before he knew it he was also in telemeter instrumentation, test-set components, small communications equipment. He kept expanding, buying, merging.  Now less than ten years later he had built up an interlocking kingdom responsible for systems management, airframes, propulsion, command systems, ground support equipment;” ⁴¹  in due course “one of the giants of the aerospace industry.”⁴²  

Both a (horizontal-axis) yo-yo and a (vertical-axis) gyroscope in proper motion (not simply hurled at some child) are rotating systems, conservators of angular momentum.  “Dyne, one newly hired engineer had told him, was a unit of force.  So to symbolize the humble beginnings of the Chiclitz empire and to get the idea of force, enterprise, engineering skill and rugged individualism in there too, Chiclitz christened the company Yoyodyne.” ⁴³

That other tycoon, Pierce Inverarity, had owned a large block of shares in Yoyodyne. Oedipa remembers, “Though he had never talked business with her, she had known it to be a fraction of him that couldn't come out even, would carry forever beyond any decimal place she might name; her love, such as it had been, remaining incommensurate with his need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines, personal antagonisms, growth rates into being.  ‘Keep it bouncing,' he'd told her once, ‘that's all the secret, keep it bouncing.'” ⁴⁴

So another figure offers an image of the human being as a whole, the yoyogram:— Das endlich Jo-Jo . A going around ( Das Dasein ist Seiendes, dem es in seinem Sein um dieses selbst geht⁴⁵ ) a null-axis ( Die Sorge — das Sein des Daseins — besagt demnach als geworfener Entwurf: Das (nichtige) Grund-sein einer Nichtigkeit ⁴⁶ ).  A conservator of ganglial fomentum (Bedeutsamkeit; das Dasein selbst ist sichauslegendes, sichaussprechendes Seiendes ⁴⁷ ).  Yet finite, keine ewige , in its understanding because of entropic dissipation proper to sense-making: Die Irre ist der Spielraum jener Wende, in der die in-sistente Ek-sistenz wendig sich stets neu vergißt und vermißt. ⁴⁸  

It must be said, though, that Pynchon concludes CoL 49  as he began it, with Wirbel imagery:

“San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries.  No one knew yet how to draw them.  [Oedipa] had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting the legacy was America.” ⁴⁹

America as climate; fundamentally an entropy-producing system.⁵⁰

DCW  August 1, 2026

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